Classic or renowned novels that you didn't enjoy?

@KimikosNightmare I love that! I’m going to try it. I have something similar where I try to remember the line of succession from queen Victoria downwards

Love some of the books on this thread but absolutely hated Narnia as a child and never bothered to re read as an adult.

I haven’t met anyone who has read On the Road and liked it.

It’s the most tedious book I’ve ever read.

Despite his omnipresence, I think Murder Must Advertise is a good novel.

Love all of Hardy, read several each year. Love most of Dickens. Love all of George Eliot except Middlemarch which is far too long.

Can't be doing with Tolkien at all.

Anna Karenina is far better than War and Peace.

Moby Dick is a classic I will never reread.

I read both as a teenager and thought Emma and Anna were these wonderful free spirits, stuck with their boring husbands and children. Re- read them in my 30s and thought what a pair of spoilt, selfish brats.

I have struggled with pretty much ever Booker winner. There's always something on the long list or short list that I'll love and then the winner leaves me totally cold. I wonder if it's just personal taste or if there's some kind of other agenda at play for picking the winning book.

It’s interesting because Harriet Vane is a bit of a proxy for DLS (and a bit of a Mary Sue too!) but there doesn’t seem to be a Wimsey in her own life story. I quite like Wimsey in some of the pre-Harriet books and in Gaudy Night but he’s fairly unbearable in some of them, and Busman’s Holiday is just embarrassing.

I've gone on to read a lot of classic Golden Age whodunnits, and that has a fair claim to be one of the first in English. Bleak House is another one. I adore that book. Dickens is one of my favourite authors, possibly uniquely on this thread!

Jane Austen is another one. When I opened Persuasion for the first time, I was entranced by Sir Walter Elliott. So many wonderful characters in Jane Austen.

Going back to whodunnits, I think I have read almost everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, many times over. She's not an author to read for the language or characterisation. It's all about the plotting for me. I also like puzzles and trivia quizzes, and I think it's all of a piece.

Middlemarch is a wonderful book. So is Daniel Deronda. I read The Mill on the Floss when I was about 17 and wasn't hugely taken with it, so have never read it again. From memory, it's a very depressing book, whereas there's more optimism in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

I love The Hobbit and LOTR. I haven't read all that much fantasy/sci fi but when it's good it's excellent. Discworld and A Song of Ice and Fire are marvellous. I like getting lost in a whole world like that. The nearest to disappointment I've had in that kind of stuff is The Last Battle, last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, which I loathed.

As for books I didn't get on with, I wasn't all that taken with Wolf Hall and I positively disliked The Secret History. Didn't take to Catcher on the Rye at all. I've read I Capture the Castle and can remember nothing about it at all! Never got past page 3 of Ulysses.

I suppose I should also say although I enjoy reading Dorothy L. Sayers I absolutely loathe Lord Peter Wimsey. What a pain in the neck he was. I also had a nasty suspicion that DLS was besotted with him. Harriet Vane deserved better!

Unfortunately QueenofMoo, I think you were too young as most of us would have also been. I think it was Virginia Woolf who said Middlemarch was a novel for grown ups. No teenagers could really be expected to appreciate the emotional complexity or writers like Eliot and Hardy. When I was about 12 my dad gave me a copy of Pride and Prejudice for Christmas. I didn't like it as I was not interested in a 'love' story and did not understand the wit. I think some people have a tendency to think if a book has no swearing or explicit sexual content then it is somehow simpler and suitable for younger teenagers. Not so of course.

When I was 14 I started reading classics but couldn't get through Middle March even setting myself a target of 1 page a day! Hated most Hardy but particularly Jude the Obscure, most depressing book ever. Loved most Austin but Persuasion is my favourite.

Now, many years later I'm wanting to read more classics as I didn't get very far last time.

Catcher in the Rye was a dud as far as I was concerned.

I couldn't warm to any of Milan Kundera's books either.

The first book we were set in secondary school was Lord of the Flies by William Golding - I was v cool and had better things to do than read but set to with a plan to skim read and scribble notes - haha, absolutely blown away by it.
But I've never read anything else by him - can anyone recommend anything in particular?

Maybe we should start a club - the Dickens is Overrated Club. I see no point in trying to force myself through a book I'm not enjoying - reading is supposed to be fun and pleasurable, not a chore.

The only Dickens I've read is A Tale of Two Cities. It took me weeks - I normally read fast, but I was avoiding it. I only read it because one of my friends was so shocked I'd never read any Dickens at all, I'd tried reading some before and couldn't get on with it at all. No chance I'm trying again. I do love a good TV adaptation though!

And every character in Wuthering Heights is terrible. I loved it as a teenager but re-read it later and really didn't.

Love George Eliot, adore Thackeray, flat out worship the Brontes, like Austen and Henry James, tolerate Hardy but smirk a little over his love of melodrama, but plunk anything by Dickens in front of me and I'll even read shite like Sophie Kinsella or JoJo Moyes instead. HG Wells called James a painful hippopotamus, but I really think that's a better description of Dickens.

But I will finish Bleak House if it fucking kills me, swelpmegod.

I can't seem to get on with Dickens. I am about a fifth of the way through Bleak House and it's taken me a month (with many other books read in the interim). There's nothing about him that pulls me back to the story once the book is lying closed on my bedside table.

I've never been able to get on with Dickens. And I am generally ok with the Victorians, my favourite novels from that period are Middlemarch and Far from the Madding Crowd.

Also not that keen on Wuthering Heights, melodramatic with unlikeable characters, but at least it's not boring like Dickens.

Love all Austen.

Also struggled with Virginia Woolf - the Hours, Mrs Dalloway - when I had to read her for my English degree, although I'm tempted to try again as a grown up.

Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, which is a shame as I have to study it as part of my OU course 😭

Moby Dick - dull dull dull and long
Wuthering Heights - overblown melodrama